WHAT is in their bathwater? (Plumbing disaster meets dinner party)

Yesterday morning, it started raining in my bathroom. With no warning, water starts pouring out of the exhaust fan and heat lamp. :eek: At least I wasn’t under it at the time. And, as a point for guys that like to leave the seat up, the leak was directly over the toilet, and largely went into the toilet, rather than all over the floor.

Ran upstairs to bang on the neighbor’s door to see what they’re up to - did the toilet or tub overflow? Kids playing in the bathtub? No response. I go back down and call the landlord. He shows up and also has no luck upstairs. At least he knows their schedule and that they’ll be home usually at 5:30, so he says he’ll be back at 6 or so. Meanwhile, the bathroom ceiling has started to bubble and sag, and several feet away, broken through. Water’s draining out of the new hole now. Internally, water’s running down inside the wall and paint’s bubbling up on the wall. The wall I had painted not two months ago. :mad:

Cut to 6:00. I’m back home from work, and the landlord re-appears to say the upstairs people aren’t home. Just then, I hear them stomping around. They just got in. He goes up and can’t get anything definite from them, so he goes back to the bathroom to try finding where the water’s coming from.

By now, the plaster/sheetrock has the strength of oatmeal, so it’s easy to pull down and find the source. Sure enough, the upstairs tub drain is leaking. The pipe itself has gone bad - not just a case of leaking joints. For whatever reasons (probably related to trade unions, more than actual public safety) sewer lines in San Francisco are quite often required to be done in copper, rather than the do-it-yourselfable plastics. Very difficult and expensive stuff to deal with. There are holes in the underside of this copper drain line - the copper has simply corroded away. Now the question is - once my landlord repairs the pipe, what’s going to prevent future leaks elsewhere? What made the pipe corrode in the first place?

And how do plumbing catastrophes know when you’re planning to have a formal party in two days? We have overnight guests arriving tomorrow, and the event itself is on Saturday, promising an apartment filled with 30 or so people. The bathroom is now a disaster, with chunks of plaster on the floor, open ceiling joists, moisture everywhere and a lovely damp and moldy smell. AUGH!!

Keep an eye out for stachybotrys (aka “toxic mold”).

Maybe they use a corrosive drain cleaner every day. I can’t think of any other reason for a drainpipe to corrode like that. (I’m not a plumber - just curious.)

Were you able to look at a cross section of the pipe? Was it corroded from the inside out?

Toxic mold? Guess that would be something we’d need to pull down the sheetrock to find. But for now, I’m assuming all we’d find is soggy ceiling. For as far as the water traveled, it looks like most if not all of the ceiling will have to be replaced. How is this stachybotrys different from “regular” mold?

As for the pipe, it had to be internal as nothing was touching its underside.

Was the pipe placed in contact with other metals? You can get accelerated galvanic corrosion under some circumstances when that happens, although usually it would be copper making a carbon-steel pipe corrode, rather than some other metal making a copper pipe corrode.

You may want to check the pH of your water, for a start.

Stachybotrys is a greeninsh-black mold, it can be either slimy or dry. Its spores are especially hazardous to pets and young children, in whom they cause or at least contribute to the disease Pulmonary Hemosiderosis (bleeding lungs). Stachybotrys was pretty much unknown in household enviroments until the '90s, when an outbreak of Pulmonary Hemosiderosis in Cleveland was traced back to homes that had the mold.

See also:
http://gcrc.meds.cwru.edu/stachy/
http://www.cnn.com/HEALTH/9711/05/deadly.mold/

Sounds more like a lead pipe to me.

Lead? Nope. Definitely copper. A: The building was built in the late 1970s, and B: Copper drains are code-required here.

Nothing was touching it from below. When the ceiling was pulled down, the pipe was just there in the joist space, with a bunch of green corrosion surrounding two reasonably round holes.

As for mold, well… just have to keep our fingers crossed as the landlord came and fixed the whole mess today while I was at work. Came home to find the ceiling patched and even textured to more or less match. Amusingly, my painter is one of the guests this weekend, and I’ve still got the leftover paint in the garage. “Put that canape down and grab a brush!”

While I am happy with a 36-hour turnaround in fixing the leak and soggy ceiling, I’m not thrilled that he just patched smallish areas, rather than replacing it.